Top Ten Tuesday – Ten Characters That Remind Me of Myself
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Top Ten Tuesday has been one of my favorite memes ever since I started blogging, so huge thanks to Jana for taking over the hosting duties!
This week’s TTT topic is Ten Characters That Remind Me of Myself. At first I thought this topic was going to be easy, but then the more I thought about it, the harder it got. Even with the ten characters I finally settled on, I couldn’t decide with most of them if they were really like me or if they are more who I hope I’m like or who I aspire to be like. I clearly don’t know myself as well as I thought I did, haha.
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10 Characters That Remind Me of Myself
- MOLLY WEASLEY (Harry Potter series). I picked Mrs. Weasley because she is such a Mama Bear. You mess with her kids and you will face her full wrath. I know I feel the same way when someone messes with my child, so I’d like to think I’ve got some of that Weasley Mama Bear instinct in me.
- HERMIONE GRANGER (also Harry Potter series). In many ways, I’m not at all like Hermione because she’s a total badass and I’m the exact opposite. But where she does remind me of myself is with her love of learning and her love of reading and of course, the library.
- CATH AVERY (Fangirl) I fell in love with Fangirl specifically because I saw myself in Cath so much. That whole socially awkward, introverted writer-type is so me.
- FITZWILLIAM DARCY (Pride and Prejudice). I definitely see myself in Mr. Darcy. I can be painfully shy around new people, which people tend to mistake for me being aloof and therefore unlikable. Like Mr. Darcy though, once you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m not so awful after all (well, hopefully anyway, lol).
- ELIZABETH BENNETT (also Pride and Prejudice). Is it weird to see myself in both of the main characters from the same book? I don’t know. Regardless though, I also see myself in Elizabeth Bennett with that stubborn streak she exhibits when it comes to Mr. Darcy, whom she thinks is looking down on her and her family. I can be stubborn as a mule as well.
- SCOUT FINCH (To Kill a Mockingbird) Scout is probably one of those characters that I wish I was more like than I really am, but her sense of curiosity and her intense desire to make sense of the things she sees happening around her has always reminded me of myself.
- FELICITY MONTAGUE (The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue) Like Hermione, Felicity is way more of a badass than I could ever hope to be, but her passion to pursue what matters to her at all costs and her belief that her gender should in no way hold her back, reminds me a bit of myself and my path to college and beyond.
- JANE EYRE (from Jane Eyre) I selected Jane because she’s stubborn and independent, and because she was a teacher, all things that remind me of myself.
- JO MARCH (Little Women). I think Jo is another of those characters that I’m somewhat similar to but wish I was more like. I selected Jo because she’s so devoted to her family and would do absolutely anything for them. Plus, she’s a writer.
- EEYORE (from Winnie the Pooh) Eeyore was always my childhood favorite and I’m sure it’s because he reminded me of myself. I can definitely be gloomy and pessimistic at times.
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Who are some fictional characters that remind you of yourself?
Review: THE UNHONEYMOONERS by Christina Lauren
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren Also by this author: My Favorite Half-Night Stand, Twice in a Blue Moon
Published by Gallery Books on May 14, 2019
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Romance
Pages: 432
Source: Netgalley
Amazon
Goodreads
FTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
THE UNHONEYMOONERS Review
I’m late to the Christina Lauren bandwagon. The Unhoneymooners is only the second novel I’ve read from this popular writing duo (My Favorite Half-Night Stand was the first). After absolutely loving both of my first two reads, however, I can happily say that I’m firmly on the bandwagon and that I now need to go back and read every Christina Lauren novel that has been written. I love these reads so much because they’re just sexy, sassy, and so much fun!
Those who know me know that romance isn’t my go-to genre. That said, however, I do enjoy a well written enemies-to-lovers story and that’s what we have here with The Unhoneymooners, with a side of the fake relationship trope thrown in for good measure. The story focuses on Olive, who has got to be the unluckiest woman in the world. When we first meet her, she has just lost her job, her roommate, and is in the process of losing her apartment as well. To top it all off, her twin sister Amy has fitted her in the ugliest possible bridesmaid dress for her wedding.
Where Olive has no luck, Amy apparently has ALL the luck and has won everything for her wedding, including the aforementioned hideous bridesmaid dress and an all-expenses paid honeymoon trip to Maui, from a variety of internet contests she had entered. Olive is way overdue for some good luck, and when food poisoning strikes at the wedding and Olive is one of the only ones to come away unscathed due to a seafood allergy, she thinks her time has come when Amy begs her to go on the honeymoon trip in her place so the free trip doesn’t go to waste. There’s a catch though, of course. Olive has to go with the groom’s brother, Ethan, her arch-nemesis, and they have to pretend to be Amy and her new husband so as not to be caught committing fraud. What a dilemma for Olive. Is a free trip worth having to spend time with the person she hates most in the world? But it’s Maui (!) so Olive reluctantly agrees to go.
The sparks fly immediately and this is where Christina Lauren’s novels suck me in. I loved the sarcastic banter between Olive and Ethan as they both navigate this strange fake relationship territory. They volleyed barbs at each other left and right, but even though Olive swears she loathes Ethan with every fiber of her being, I could still sense some sizzling chemistry lurking beneath the surface. For that reason, it was just so much fun to get to know each of them better as they’re finally getting to know each other better and setting aside assumptions they had made early on when they first met.
All of that sarcastic banter, coupled with their fake relationship escapades as they tried not to blow their own cover as fake honeymooners, made for a quick and hilarious read. I literally laughed out loud several time along the way and was left with a smile on my face long after I finished reading.
Sexy and fun, The Unhoneymooners is the ideal read to put in your beach bag this summer.
GOODREADS SYNOPSIS:
Olive is always unlucky: in her career, in love, in…well, everything. Her identical twin sister Amy, on the other hand, is probably the luckiest person in the world. Her meet-cute with her fiancé is something out of a romantic comedy (gag) and she’s managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a series of Internet contests (double gag). Worst of all, she’s forcing Olive to spend the day with her sworn enemy, Ethan, who just happens to be the best man.
Olive braces herself to get through 24 hours of wedding hell before she can return to her comfortable, unlucky life. But when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning from eating bad shellfish, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. And now there’s an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii up for grabs.
Putting their mutual hatred aside for the sake of a free vacation, Olive and Ethan head for paradise, determined to avoid each other at all costs. But when Olive runs into her future boss, the little white lie she tells him is suddenly at risk to become a whole lot bigger. She and Ethan now have to pretend to be loving newlyweds, and her luck seems worse than ever. But the weird thing is that she doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, she feels kind of… lucky.
About Christina Lauren
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of long-time writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The #1 international bestselling coauthor duo writes both Young Adult and Adult Fiction, and together has produced fourteen New York Times bestselling novels. They are published in over 30 languages, have received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, won both the Seal of Excellence and Book of the Year from RT Magazine, named Amazon and Audible Romance of the Year, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and been nominated for several Goodreads Choice Awards. They have been featured in publications such as Forbes, The Washington Post, Time, Entertainment Weekly, People, O Magazine and more. Their third YA novel, Autoboyography was released in 2017 to critical acclaim, followed by Roomies, Love and Other Words, Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, and the Publisher’s Weekly starred My Favorite Half-Night Stand, out in December.
Review: MIDDLEGAME
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire 
Published by Tor.com on May 7, 2019
Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Pages: 528
Source: Netgalley
Amazon
Goodreads
FTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
MIDDLEGAME Review
Seanan McGuire’s latest novel Middlegame is a very ambitious novel. It reads like equal parts science fiction and fantasy, and is a wild ride from start to finish. It features twins separated at birth who somehow have the ability to telepathically communicate with one another, as well a man who wants to use the twins to help him carry out his ambitious and perhaps delusional plan to become a god and control the universe. If that isn’t enough to pique your curiosity, Middlegame also features alchemy, time loops, and its fair share of ruthless killers.
This was my first time reading one of McGuire’s novels, but after seeing so many stellar reviews for the author’s Wayward Children series, I fully expected to love Middlegame. That said, however, I unfortunately didn’t love it nearly as much as I was expecting to. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it wasn’t a great read, but part of it was because I just felt like I had to work way too hard to keep everything that was going on straight in my mind. The plot is very complicated and twisty, and then time starts to twist as well, which made everything all the more complicated, and at a certain point, my brain just screamed “Enough!” On top of that, I felt like the pacing was slow in places which didn’t help since the book is over 500 pages long.
That said, however, even though I didn’t love the read because it confused me a few too many times for my liking, there were quite a few things I did enjoy.
I love how wild and original the overall concept of the novel is. On one level, it reminds me of Frankenstein, with James Reed using his alchemical skills to create children that can help him achieve his goal. His actions and motivations are unnatural and more than a little creepy, but yet fascinating at the same time. On another level though, Middlegame reminds me of nothing I’ve ever read before. The idea of this Doctrine of Ethos being the key to controlling the Universe and that Reed can somehow harness its power and become a God if he places half of the doctrine in each child just blew my mind. Reed was a disturbing yet almost mesmerizing character just because he’s so passionate that his goal is 100% achievable and is clearly totally okay with the idea of using his homemade children as science experiments and with eliminating anyone or anything that happens to get in his way.
While I found Reed completely disturbing, I found the other main characters, twins Roger and Dodger, quite endearing, especially the connection they shared. The implanting of half the Ethos Doctrine in each of them has left Roger as a master of all language and communication, while Dodger is an absolute genius at math. There is literally no math problem she can’t solve. Put them together and they’re pretty much unstoppable. As soon as they are “born,” Reed separates them. He has several sets of twins that he’s experimenting with so this “separation” variable is specific to Roger and Dodger’s experiment. Except that they somehow manage to connect telepathically even though they live thousands of miles apart. No matter how many times they get re-separated, they manage to find each other again.
Even though I felt frustrated and confused sometimes by everything that was going on in Middlegame, that bond between Roger and Dodger is what really kept me turning the pages. I was just so invested in them and ultimately wanted them to realize they were pawns in Reed’s deadly game and somehow turn the tables on him and stop the madness.
While Middlegame wasn’t a book that I loved, I did enjoy the read overall and would definitely recommend it to fans of science fiction and really to anyone who enjoys a wild and twisty read that makes you put on your thinking cap. It has also intrigued me enough about McGuire’s unique brand of storytelling that I definitely plan to read the Wayward Children series.
GOODREADS SYNOPSIS:
Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story.
Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math.
Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.
Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own.
Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.
About Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.
Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?,” and can be amused for hours by almost anything. “Almost anything” includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.
In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music (see the Albums page for details). She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…”, as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.
Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.
Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.